The Making of a Classic: Orval
During this time of pandemic, when we have more time for reading than sampling new beers, I thought it would be a great time to explore some classic, much imitated (but rarely equaled) beers and what makes them tick. Click here to see other beers in the series.
On my first trip to Belgium in 2011, I toured ten breweries and in the majority of them, found myself chatting with brewers about one beer they especially loved. It reached a high point at Brasserie Dupont, where Olivier DeDeycker showed me a flat of the bottles he’d recently picked up and stashed in his cellar. The beer? Orval.
It’s such an important beer for so many reasons—its history and weird provenance, the use of Brettanomyces through long decades when that yeast was being eliminated from breweries, and its elusive, mutable nature. Few breweries make a beer so profound it’s the only beer they make (a lower-alcohol beer served at the monastery is just watered down)—but few breweries make a beer like Orval.
History
The Abbaye Notre-Dame d’Orval is located just a kilometer from the French border in the southern Belgian Ardennes mountains, where open fields give way to forest land and river valleys laced in mist. The mountains aren’t huge, but they offer dramatic views and, for people seeking solace, quiet pockets protected by trees and peaks. The first monks arrived there almost a thousand years ago, attracted by location’s remove. Like so many monasteries in Europe, it enjoyed the usual ravages of war, fire, and ultimately, sacking in 1793 as a consequence of the French Revolution. Completely razed, the area sat abbey-less until the 1920s, when monks used ochre-colored sandstone known as pierre de France to rebuild. They built the brewery first, to generate revenue to fund a new abbey.
The Legend
On Orval’s label and cap you will find a picture of a fish with what turns out to be, on closer inspection, a golden ring in its mouth. There’s a legend behind the image, and it starts with the Tuscan Countess Matilde, a widow and one of the first arrivals to the region in the eleventh century. Before the monastery was built, she was sitting near a spring to rest and restore herself. When she reached into the spring, her wedding band slipped off. Distraught, she immediately started praying and before long a fish rose to the surface of the water, her golden ring in its mouth. “Truly this place is a Val d’Or [valley of gold],” she exclaimed. To this day, the pool of legend enjoys a prominent place at the monastery—and the spring remains the source for the beer.
Unlike the other Trappist breweries—and indeed most breweries on the planet—Orval has only ever made one beer, a blend of different influences. The founding brewer was Martin Pappenheimer, a German rather than a Belgian. (The monks at Orval have never brewed themselves, though the facility is on the monastery grounds. It exists to generate revenue to fund operations.) His assistant was John Vanhuele who was Belgian—though he had brewed for years in Britain. This makes some sense. Germans had mastered “modern” brewing (lagerbier), while the British had for centuries been country leading innovation and quality standards.
Of the two, though, it was Vanhuele who seems to have had the most influence—for Orval bears a far closer resemblance to British beer than German. Orval gives credit to Pappenheimer for the aggressive bitterness of the beer (by standards relative to Belgium now), but little else seems very German. Indeed, the use of infusion mashing rather than decoction, caramel malts, and dry-hopping are all characteristic of pale ales.
There’s also reason to believe Vanhuele tapped into the regional Belgian heritage as well. Orval is famously dosed with Brettanomyces, giving it a rustic quality that increases with time. This corresponds closely to a trend that would pick up steam in Belgium after the Second World War, which featured beers labeled “saison” that were very dry, complex, refined, and effervescent. Local drinkers in the late 1930s and 1940s wouldn’t have found Orval to be unusual, or at least not in the way it is now.
By fairly reliable accounts, the beer hasn’t changed much over the nearly 90 years since it was first brewed. One of the largest changes came in 2007, when Orval expanded and renovated the brewery and replaced open fermenters—oh hey, that’s classically British as well—with cylindro-conicals. It took them three years, starting in 2004, to figure out how to use those tanks without losing the character the open fermenters gave. My sense is that it worked; I’ve been drinking Orval since the 1990s and didn’t notice the change.
The Beer
Orval starts out as a fairly standard beer, with pale malts, caramel, and sugar (added post-boil) in the grist and a single-infusion mash of 149°/65°. It’s boiled for 90 minutes with a changing lineup of hops. When I visited in 2011, they were using Hersbrucker, US and Strisselspalt, but now use Hallertauer, Strisselspalt, and Styrian Golding. The beer is fermented cold for five days, starting at 56°/15° and rising to 73°/23°. All typical.
The fun begins when the beer goes into horizontal tanks for just three weeks with wild yeast and bags of dry-hops (again, varieties change). Interestingly, it’s actually a mixed culture of regular and wild yeast. I wasn’t able to nail down the strain of Brettanomyces, but it tastes a lot like Bruxellensis to me. The bottles spend a month in a 60°/15° warm room before going out.
This is the key to one of the beer’s most important qualities: unlike most Brett beers, Orval does not sit on wild yeast long. It is essentially bottle-conditioned with Brett, and the yeast’s main work is done months after release. Bottled at 6.2%, it can pick up another full point of alcohol as the Brettanomyces continue to work.
That’s why young Orval, if you can find it, is an entirely different beer than aged Orval. Vibrant and spirited, it’s marked by hops that are as resinous and green as any in Belgian beer. As Orval ages, the hops fall back and the Brettanomyces comes on, providing a lemon-zest note. The beer gets drier the longer it ages, and will become an austere, sherry-like ale of Brett-y complexity. Although there’s a loss of liveliness, Orval becomes more soulful, like an older singer whose range has been replaced by life and character. Wild yeasts constantly change the beer, making mutability its nature.
Orval is one of those beers that can take a while to appreciate. For starters, one can’t know the beer after just a bottle. It’s important to try it at different ages and see how it evolves. (Most fans prefer it at a particular age.) But the complexity and unusual elements—caramel malt and Brett, assertive hops—make it unfamiliar. It doesn’t track with other beers. I once led a tasting with a novice group who tried it blind, and I don’t think a single person liked it. But with time, you may find yourself wanting to buy flats like Olivier DeDeycker. (Good luck with that; he must know a guy.) It’s such an important beer to me that Sally buys me a bottle every year for Christmas. It’s one of the few beers I go to in times of need, when I crave an experience that will dazzle me no matter how high my expectations.
So far, it’s never let me down.